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Andrew Seneca
Andrew Seneca is an ex-slave Ventrue who is strongly involved in human trafficking. Biography Born as a slave in a cotton plantation in Georgia, Andrew grew up knowing nothing but hard work and despair. Despite this, he was educated by his mother in etiquette and when he turned fourteen, he was taken to be a manservant to the plantation owner. During a trip to Virginia, he witnessed how a shrouded women fed on the slaves and asked her of her business. The two talked and the women seemed to be fascinated by him. When she returned, the two talked again and Andrew grew to like the woman, even after he witnessed how she fed on one of his fellow slaves. On the night before he and his owner were to return to Georgia, she asked him if he wanted to come with her, and to be like her. With only a little hesitation, he said that he did, and she stole him away that night. When she gave him the Embrace, he felt two sensations that sat like great weights on him: a soul-deep hunger, and the terrible feeling that he had traded one kind of slavery for another. Andrew realized a short time later that those two things became intermixed with his Embrace, and he could feed only among the slaves, craving the taste of desperation and despair in their blood. His sire educated him and taught him how to read. It was during the lecture of 's , that he had a troublesome epiphany. Every part of existence was slavery of some kind, and genuine freedom was an illusion. Even the mighty Kindred were beholden to the laws of the Camarilla, to tradition of clan and sect, and to the very Curse that defined them. His sire comforted him, telling him that is was possible to choose his masters and become the slave of as few as possible, through ruthlessness, ambition, and intellect. Andrew took the name of the scholar as his surname, considering the man's philosophy to be as much as part of who he was as his body and Blood. In the following nights, Seneca was presented to the prince in Philadelphia, having the experience of being one of the few black Kindred in Camarilla society during this time. In the next decade, however, he proved his worth to sire, court, and Prince many times over. Seneca was quick to appraise a situation and quick to react appropriately. Unlike many childer, he did not rebel against the demands of the Ventrue elders. To his mind, even their bloodiest demands were steps on the road toward mastery, compared to the dead-end path of being another man's property. When the North began to abolish slavery, Seneca found that his feeding ground began to dwindle. After a discussion with his sire, he resolved to move to the South. Andrew sent his retainers ahead to scout out plantations that fit his needs while he tied up affairs in Philadelphia. His sire released him formally in the court of Philadelphia, and the Prince offered him a letter of introduction to the Prince of Atlanta. He was greeted coldly and advised to stay away from other domains. Seneca's life became one of simplicity, affording him the time to study the classics at his leisure, in extravagant guest housing in one of several plantations he all but owned by then. He took to studying law as well, and from there politics. When the Emancipation Proclamation was released, Seneca joined with many others of his Clan to suppress the movement but the Civil War destroyed his herds again. He was forced to flee into other nations where slavery continued. For the next several decades, Seneca haunted backwater domains often populated by thoroughly antagonistic Kindred — or worse — just to maintain a herd from which he could feed. He made a point of keeping his hand in politics wherever he was, in order to maintain the status quo and deny slaves as many rights as possible in order to break their spirits and keep them down. When he was forced to flee heavily wounded to the United States in the early 1900s, he frenzied upon arriving in Alabama, and awoke from his rage in the home of a freeman family, their dwelling a hideous bloody ruin. Fearful of having violated the Traditions of the domain even before he could present himself to the Prince, he burned the home to the ground, affixing the flaming cross of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan to their front lawn to divert attention. He discovered that it was not the slavery that was important to feed him, but despair and the knowledge that they were not considered people by the law. With this newly discovered freedom, Andrew settled in to Kindred politics with gusto. Over the next few decades, he served as Primogen in both Atlanta and Alabama. He was a voice of stability, abhorring violence except when strictly necessary, preferring to use persuasion and alliances even on those who presented themselves as enemies, all the while using his influence from the shadows to ensure that the life of the negroes was as miserable as possible. When the Civil Rights movement finally showed itself as a lasting entity, Andrew Seneca found it alarming. He sent his servants to investigate this movement, hoping to find a way to dissolve or otherwise hinder it. What he discovered terrified him, a movement of strong, intelligent individuals no longer content to remain lesser-than. Bitterness and envy stirred within him. Where were such people in his day? Who were they to demand what he had never had? Seneca worked subtly, implicating some of the movement's leaders in vice and scandal, discrediting them. He even met with Theo Bell, another black ex-slave, who was assigned to root out Anarchs who used the Movement as cover. The two formed an uneasy political alliance: Seneca sought to destroy the Civil Rights movement, while Bell tacitly supported it. Seneca dutifully reported the activities of Anarchs who had attached themselves to the movement to Bell, who disrupted both Anarchs and activists out of necessity. In time, the two Kindred came to hate one another, though the Princes of the American South hailed them both for their efforts. Tonight, the pair remain cordial in public, despite the fact that the fragile alliance worsened over time into active hatred. When all their efforts proved to be naught, Seneca restructured his life again. Focusing now on organized crime, he engages in various forms of human trafficking and illegal slavery. He is involved with brothels in which immigrants are kept imprisoned, with border-town sweatshops, and with farms in California, Texas, and Florida that employ migrant workers who are practically kept as slaves. He remains one step ahead of legal authorities in such situations, and works constantly through his influence and connections opposing anti-immigration laws, as well as laws that would grant more rights and protections to immigrant workers. Seneca moves from domain to domain, tending to his needs, rarely staying for more than a year or so. He is inevitably granted domain visitation rights by the Prince of these places, as he is happy to help his hosts with any issues he can. He is also an avowed enemy of the Anarchs, forever bitter at their part in the success of the Civil Rights movement. References * Category:Ventrue (VTM) Category:Eighth Generation vampires Category:Vampire: The Masquerade character